Analysis

What does Sociology care about?

I've analyzed recent publications in Sociological Theory and find that the paper I want to write won't fit well. I moved on to analyze Social Studies of Science, and found that journal even more incompatible with my aims. AJS has a handful of papers which are in my domain.

• Most good sociological literature is trying to understand something so they can fix it.
• I would like to shoot for the journal I end up publishing in.

Theory and society

The journal Theory and Society publishes theoretically-informed analyses of social processes, providing a forum for an international community of scholars. It opens its pages to authors working at the frontiers of social analysis, regardless of discipline. The coverage ranges across a broad landscape, from prehistory to contemporary affairs, from treatments of individuals to nations to world culture, from discussions of theory to methodological critique, from the First World to Third World and the Global South. The effort is always to bring together theory, criticism and concrete observation.

• The image of the veil in social theory - Baehr 2019
• The narrative constitution of identity: A relational and network approach

Who does work like this?

I asked Web of Science who extended Moody 2004, and found many good leads.

Also, the authors who participated in the Poetics special edition are interesting!

• Jean-Phillippe Cointet (CV) - check out his work on Context Manager
• Achim Edelmann (cv)
• John Levi Martin (cv) @ U. Chicago
  • Poetics 2020 Relating social and symbolic relations in quantitative text analysis. A study of parliamentary discourse in the Weimar Republic here looks pretty relevant (and interesting!)
    • What does who say or do to who in Parliament, and how does this
    • Really interesting (could do the U.N. analysis like this?)
• John Mohr (cv)
• Peter Bearman (cv)
• Ryan Light (cv)
• Stephen Vaisey (cv)

Archived ideas

• Obviously AJS is a good choice, but the likelihood of getting in are quite slim.
• Another option is to publish a preprint, with the paper organized how I see fit, in ways that best explain what I did. I could even self-publish. The only down side is the need for peer review, which would be invisible.
• Social Moments seems like a great option.
  • Targeted at grad students, so my competition (and political barriers) are limited
  • Peer reviewed
  • Interdisciplinary
  • Free!
  • "editorially independent"